Charles Ives

Charles Ives was the great Yankee maverick: independent, imaginative, inventive, inspired, idealistic, democratic, optimistic, ambitious, yet remarkably humble. He is now considered as important in music history as he was in his own time as a businessman. His impact in the business world in the 1910s and ’20s was huge; in the music world he made barely a ripple until long after he had given up composing.

Early Years: Son of a Connecticut Bandmaster

Ives was fortunate to be born into a solid, middle-class family in Danbury, Connecticut. His father, George Ives, was a gifted musician—an outstanding bandmaster in the Civil War and the “Music Man” of the town in the opera house, bandstand, and churches. George taught his son piano and drums, and soon the young future composer took up organ. In 1887, Ives wrote a song, “Slow March”—the first of over two dozen songs that he produced before going off to college—and, in the same year, his first surviving instrumental work, Holiday Quickstep. But he was also one of the best young athletes in Danbury, excelling in football and baseball (shortstop, outfielder, and especially pitcher).

In 1891, Ives performed his new Variations on “America” in Brewster, New York—a marvelous parody of the prevailing style of organ showpieces. Its polytonal interludes made his peers chuckle and the rest of the congregation frown. His father tried to get the work published, but it was rejected. (Today it is the mainstay of Theodore Presser Company’s income.)

In 1893, Ives moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to study at Hopkins Grammar School, where he composed “Song for Harvest Season,” featuring a four-part fugato for soprano and three brass instruments with every part in a different key. He also pitched heroically for the Hopkins baseball team, defeating Yale’s team. Upon graduation, he accompanied his uncle on a trip to the momentous Columbian Exposition in Chicago—a World’s Fair for the ages. He heard the Sousa Band, Scott Joplin, Alexandre Guilmant, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and experienced everything American for the New Age (a vast sea of electric lights being the most stunning).

At age 20, Ives matriculated at Yale College, where the Department of Music had just been established, and studied with the young Boston organist-composer Horatio Parker. In his four years at Yale, Ives learned to compose in larger forms—to develop his musical ideas and better control the orchestral palette, in the manner of Brahms. He composed pieces for organ, chorus (secular and sacred), string quartet, band, and orchestra, including his graduation thesis Symphony No. 1 (in its second, fourth, and possibly third movements). One of his last (of about 50) songs composed in the Yale years is “Feldeinsamkeit,” surely one of the most beautiful art songs of the 19th century (pace Schubert).

Ives: Quartet No. 1 for Strings ("From the Salvation Army")

Shockingly, Ives’s father died just one month into the first term of his son’s freshman year. Although Ives never really recovered from the blow, he did become one of the most popular of all his Yale contemporaries.

Middle Period: An Insurance Executive in New York

Upon graduation from Yale, Ives moved to New York City, sharing an apartment  with other Yale alums that they dubbed “Poverty Flat.” Ives’s father had warned his son not to pursue music as a vocation, so Ives secured a job as an actuary at Mutual Life Insurance Company.

In 1900 Ives became organist of the august Central Presbyterian Church, then kitty-corner from Carnegie Hall, and started delving into ragtime style. In 1902, he composed his Celestial County cantata in an attempt to launch a professional composing career, perhaps even to land a job in music at Yale. It was pleasant but fell short of his hopes; he quit his church job.

Free from the distraction of his duties as a church organist, Ives wrote with new abandon, inventing what we now call “cumulative form,” in which fragments go through development toward a final revelation of the full theme. An early experimental piece from this time is his Fugue in Four Keys on “The Shining Shore.”

The decade was one of invention, but with a self-conscious conservatism. It produced the remarkable, Yale-nostalgic Piano Trio, whose three movements recall discussion of a conundrum with a philosophy professor, fun and games on the Old Campus, and a sermon and hymn-sing at Yale’s Battell Chapel. He also composed over 50 songs in the decade.

In the summer of 1905, Ives vacationed with his Yale friend Dave Twichell and re-met his sister Harmony. Sparks flew. Ives felt empowered to be himself. New ideas flowed into Three-Page Sonata for piano, the cubistic Four Ragtime Dances, the riotous “Country Band” March, Gong on the Hook and Ladder, and From the Steeples and Mountains. The following year produced Hallowe’en for string quartet, Scherzo: Over the Pavements, and the “In the Cage” movement of Set for Theatre Orchestra.

Ives had observed the insurance business for long enough and had big ideas about how to do it better. He and his fellow insurance man, Julian Myrick, established Ives & Co. in 1907. “Poverty Flat” moved from the perch overlooking Central Park to an even more posh spot on the east side of Gramercy Park. Here, Ives composed the “In the Barn” movement of Violin Sonata No. 2, Largo for Violin (which became the Largo for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano), Prelude on “Eventide,” and Scherzo: All the Way Around and Back.

In June 1908, after a long, very Victorian courtship, Ives married Harmony Twichell. During their honeymoon in the west corners of Connecticut and Massachusetts, they took a walk alongside the Housatonic River on a Sunday morning. The impression of the mists above the moving water, paired with the sound of a hymn being sung across the way, led Ives to jot down some ideas for a chamber piece with organ, which then became a sketch with horns and strings, a now-lost song (“The Housatonic at Stockbridge”), and then the final movement of the orchestral piece Three Places in New England, which was later arranged as the song in his collection 114 Songs.

Ives: “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” for Voice and Piano

In 1909 Ives & Co. became Ives & Myrick and quickly used Ives’s new ideas—estate planning, novel agent training and networking, and nationwide licensing of his concepts—to generate massive growth and income. Ives & Myrick soon became the largest insurance agency in the country. Nevertheless, Ives accelerated his composing: he finalized his masterful Piano Trio and also completed Washington’s Birthday, Largo Risoluto Nos. 1 and 2, and the first movement of his Second Orchestral Set (at first a tribute to Stephen Foster). Ives then sketched a piano concerto, inspired by the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, that later became the second movement of the “Concord” Sonata. In 1910 Halley’s Comet glittered the night sky (perhaps, for Ives, suggesting the Star of Bethlehem drawing us forward and upward: “…what of that beaming star?” as the hymn “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night” goes) and inspired Ives to conceive his great Symphony No. 4.

In the 1910s, Ives reached a mastery of style, celebrating everything American, especially of New England: the “Holidays” tone poems, the great String Quartet No. 2, the appropriately dense Robert Browning Overture, two important Orchestral Sets, and more than 30 songs. He also composed his profound “Black March” (The “Saint-Gaudens” in Boston Common) for piano (later incorporated into Three Places in New England), endeavored to compose 27 piano etudes (remarkably experimental pieces), and found his own distinct voice in the Emerson Overture/Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which morphed into the “Emerson” movement of the “Concord” Sonata. Unfortunately, in 1915, a significant portion of the church music Ives had composed up to this point was lost when the Central Presbyterian Church moved and discarded its music library.

Ives: Quartet No. 2 for Strings

Late Period: Publications and Exposure

In fall 1918, in a whirlwind of composing, insurance work, and political activism, Ives suffered a major breakdown brought on by what he would soon be told was diabetes. He retreated to Asheville, North Carolina, to recover, but diabetes was incurable at the time and amounted to a death sentence. In convalescence, he polished his “Concord” Sonata, wrote his Essays Before a Sonata, and hired the engraving and typesetting of the sonata and its companion essay.

Ives: Sonata No. 2 for Piano, “Concord, Mass., 1840–60”

Back in New York, Ives further considered “end of life” projects. His songs were one of his treasures, so he gathered all he could put his hands on and oversaw the engraving of what became the iconic 114 Songs. (We now know he wrote at least 207 songs; 185 are extant and performable.) Next came his crowning symphonic work, Symphony No. 4. Ives reworked the movements, gave the whole a cyclic structure, paid for the engraving of the “Comedy” movement, and worked toward the eventual 1927 premiere of movements one and two by players from the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Eugene Goossens. The full work was finally heard in 1965 with Leopold Stokowski leading his American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. All along, Ives also worked on ideas for a Universe Symphony and a Third Orchestral Set, completing only one movement for each.

Ives: Six Songs

Young composers, conductors, and musicians started to discover Ives. Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, John Kirkpatrick, Sol Babitz, and others helped champion Ives’s extraordinary output. In 1930, Slonimsky premiered Orchestral Set No. 1: Three Places in New England. In 1938 and 1939, Kirkpatrick premiered the “Concord” Sonata and an important group of Ives’s songs. In 1946, Harrison conducted the premiere of Symphony No. 3: The Camp Meeting, which then won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Music. In 1948, Robert Shaw led the premiere of two great choral works, Ives’s Psalm 67 and Harvest Home Chorales. That same year, the Piano Trio finally debuted, at the Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory of Music, in Ohio. In 1951, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic premiered Ives’s Second Symphony, but Ives couldn’t attend.

Ives’s last years were a struggle with health issues. Just a month before his death in May 1954, Antol Dorati led the first performance of the four-movement Holidays Symphony. Ives’s music yet thrives—one of the glories of America’s culture.

Watching and Listening

Charles Ives produced a significant amount of chamber music, including two string quartets, four violin sonatas (plus two that are incomplete), over 20 works for mixed ensembles, a piano trio, three piano sonatas, a substantial group of piano studies, six piano marches, and over a dozen other piano pieces. Unfortunately, little of his organ music survives. We know that there was a great deal of other chamber literature, but it is now lost.

String Quartet No. 1 is utterly charming, the Second a masterpiece in the American repertoire. Piano Sonata No. 1 was assembled in 1914 from earlier pieces but waited until 1949 for its premiere—an all-too-typical story for Ives’s music. Piano Sonata No. 2 (“Concord”)—a contemplation on the souls of four great American authors and thinkers—ranks as one of Ives’s, and American music’s, most noted works.

Ives’s output was crowned by his phenomenal output of songs. The 185 surviving, complete songs display an astounding range of creativity. Ives does not impose a particular style on his settings but rather invents a new, custom-appropriate style at every turn to illuminate the texts. The result is that every song is a new experience. “Evening,” “Ann Street,” and “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” sound nothing like one another. “Charlie Rutlage” is undoubtedly the greatest cowboy setting ever penned—like “General Booth Enters into Heaven,” a dramatic aria. Ives was an ardent pacifist (“he could get fightin’ mad on the subject,” John Kirkpatrick recalled): two of his most touching songs, “In Flanders Fields” and “Tom Sails Away”—each reacting to the grim war with an elevated humanity—date from 1917, a year that also produced the nostalgic song “The Things Our Fathers Loved.” In 1922 Ives gathered all the songs he could locate at the time and self-published the iconic 114 Songs.

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